


Veritas

by last_illusions (injured_eternity)



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-31
Updated: 2009-05-31
Packaged: 2017-10-17 09:22:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/injured_eternity/pseuds/last_illusions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The irony has not escaped him that it was a professional escort who had gotten him to say more about his divorce than anyone else. Mildly angsty Hotch/JJ, whether romance or friendship, post-Pleasure Is My Business.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Veritas

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: 2x07 ("North Mammon"); 4x16 ("Pleasure Is My Business")

“She was right, you know.”

He looks up with a start, wondering why he didn’t notice her arrival. She just stands there in his doorway, watching him with an indescribable expression in her blue eyes. He doesn’t really know what she’s talking about (or so he tells himself), so he brushes it aside—it’s a cheap tactic he’d catch in a second, and he knows she will, too, but it might buy him a moment.

“I thought you’d have left by now.”

A small smile crinkles the corners of her eyes. She’s spent enough time surrounded by profilers to recognise evasion when she sees it, but she lets him get away with it, because she’ll get him later. “I could say the same to you.”

 _What do I have to go home_ to? He bites back the answer tinged with all the bitterness he keeps locked in a box labelled “Do Not Open” and says instead, “This case wants a lot of paperwork.”

That surprises a wry laugh out of her, light and musical. “Understatement of the year. I’ll be writing up forms for this case into next _week_.”

He nods in sympathy; bureaucratic red tape would never be classified as the interesting part of their job, and he’s not actually certain which of them has to deal with more of it. “You, too?”

Taking that as her cue to walk in and sit down—she hates having conversations from doorways when they’re longer than a few brief sentences—she rolls her eyes. “The lawyers want our asses,” she admits. “It’s hardly a surprise, but there’s a good amount of precaution we need to take. If there’s a loophole, they’ll find it and run.”

He huffs out a small laugh, almost like it’s unintentional, and she shoots him a speculative glance.

“They teach you to do that in law school, don’t they?”

“Creating Red Tape 101,” he answers. “If you fail that, you’re never going to win a case.”

She chuckles softly, reaching up to brush loose blonde hair out of her eyes; she’s still not used to the new length and more often than not finds herself wondering where the weight went. Part of her feels like she should leave; long conversations with her boss after hours are really not the norm. Mentally, she appends “anymore” to that assessment, because there was a time when they’d all go for dinner or drinks after work, and back then they’d been a family as well as a team. Now those threads feel like they’re fraying, and it doesn’t help that for him, the threads for _his_ family have already broken. It’s that part of her—the one that recognises this, the one that realises however much they _don’t_ know about Aaron Hotchner’s life, they’re still witness to things as private as his divorce, as Haley’s unhappiness—that keeps her in the chair.

For his part, he wonders why she’s still there; she has her son at home, and he doesn’t doubt Henry and Will’s company are far superior to his own. But he doesn’t voice this sentiment, knows better than to ask, and instead he just meets her, stare for stare. Motherhood suits her, he thinks. She reminds him a bit of Haley after Jack was born, and that thought is like bittersweet chocolate—it’s soft and sweet and melts just enough, but at the same time it’s sharp enough to make you wonder why you do this to yourself. Because the irony has not escaped him that it was a professional escort—their unsub, no less—who had gotten him to say more about his divorce than anyone else. But he’s unit chief; he’s Aaron Hotchner, and he knows better than to let a killer inside his head.

Which is one thing in the manuals, in training, when they warn you that sometimes profiling is as much about playing a role as it is knowing when someone _else_ isn’t who they say they are. It’s completely another when it’s you and your unsub and the killer is getting in your head and you can’t deny what they’re saying because you know damn well it’s true—you know it’s true because you’ve locked those thoughts in a box and refused to open it again for fear of the plagues you might unleash.

But he sighs and gives himself a mental shake. Those aren’t things he lets himself think about except in the middle of the night, when sleep is an elusive mistress and his faults line up of their own volition in the dark, like his own personal firing squad.

She’s just watching him, when he looks up; he feels her eyes on him. She reads people better than she should, and she knows full well her boss doesn’t just get lost in thought.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

The words are bolder than is her wont—she’ll stand up to him about the job if she feels it’s necessary, but they don’t push the personal front unless it _becomes_ the job. Maybe this _would_ become part of the job, but she doesn’t know that, and he won’t admit it. So he just looks up, holding her gaze with his and trying not to flinch away. He doesn’t know what to say in answer to that, doesn’t know how to avoid it.

“What?” he manages after a moment.

Attention away from him, she fiddles idly with the ring on her right hand. She’s standing on the border of a war zone, and she knows the map she has won’t tell her where the landmines are.

“Dumb doesn’t suit you,” she answers finally, choosing to call him on it. Tipping her head to one side, her gaze turns appraising, but her tone is level and just JJ enough to almost make him smile. “You can’t pull it off.”

“JJ...”

A small smile plays at her lips: that, right there, is the Hotch they all miss so much, but none of them can figure out how to pull him from hiding.

“I’m right,” she points out, and his eyes meet hers for the briefest second, bouncing off like she’s a landing pad to skitter away to something—anything—that can’t see as clearly as she does.

When he looks up again, his expression is carefully schooled to be teasing, nothing more. He can’t afford this conversation, because he doesn’t know what he’ll say if he starts.

“You generally are,” comes the softly flip answer.

It doesn’t fool her, and they both know it; the look she sends him, eyebrows raised, eyes just slightly disapproving, reads “who are you kidding” as clearly as if she’d said it aloud.

“You know what I mean,” she says instead.

“JJ...”

“Saying my name repeatedly makes that no less true.”

At that, he wants to shy away, to lash out, to say something no matter how uncharacteristic it is, because he feels cornered. It’s ridiculous, too, because all he has to do is pull rank and tell her to leave, and he’d have his space back right there.

“JJ, it happened.” Unconsciously, his right hand moves to his left, reaching for the ring he no longer wears. When he comes in contact with bare skin, he pulls back like he’s been burnt and hopes she didn’t notice. “It’s done, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It was my fault.”

There—he can say that, because if _he_ says it, he doesn’t have to listen to someone else say it to him. He reads it in Haley’s eyes every time he goes to see Jack, and she doesn’t have to _tell_ him she thinks he didn’t try hard enough for him to _know_ she thinks that.

“The fault belongs to both of you.”

The tone is almost flat. It’s not pitying, and it’s certainly not what he expected her to say. If people are on Haley’s side, they’ll agree silently—or not so silently, depending on how much they dislike him. If they’re on his side, there’s always a rush to deny his culpability, casting the blame on Haley instead, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s implicit or not. No one’s willing to admit that there’s some give-and-take that didn’t quite work for either of them.

“Thank you.” He can’t think of a better way to say that, but she gets it and nods in acknowledgement. “But that doesn’t mean I tried hard enough.”

“It doesn’t mean you didn’t, either,” she shoots back, as much for her own sake as for his. She has to believe that, both because she knows it’s true and because if she doesn’t, she’ll go crazy as the world stops making sense. “ ‘Narcissistic, self-absorbed, pathological avoidance of paternal responsibilities’.”

She quotes his own words at him, and he reels back like she’s slapped him full across the face. Intellectually, he knows she’s not talking about him, but that doesn’t make the words sting any less. Before the hurt can surface as anger, she continues, “That isn’t you. Our job… doesn’t always leave room for family—how many times have you said that? Maybe you weren’t always there, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t want to be, that you didn’t care.”

She’s out of breath now, forced to stop because she has no air, but if she’d stopped to breathe she’d have lost her nerve. Already she wants to sink into the floor, because he’s just staring at her, an unreadable expression in his eyes. He doesn’t really know what to say to that—it’s been so long since he’s had more than passing casual conversation with someone not case-related that he’s not entirely sure how to do it anymore.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she starts to say, because this Hotch is different from the man she started working for, and if she’s overstepped her boundaries she’s not entirely certain he won’t fire her on the spot.

Instead, he just shakes his head, holding up a hand to stop her. That she feels she _needs_ to apologise throws him more than he wants to admit. “No,” he tells her. “Don’t. It’s just... it’s different...”

“When you have kids?”

He shakes his head again. “That’s not what I said.”

“I think it’s sort of what you meant.” He catches her eye, and she shrugs. “You think I don’t feel guilty when I can’t get home for three days because we’re off on a case? Between my mother and Will, Henry is taken care of; just because I know that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be there to do it myself, and I feel like the world’s most awful mother when I can’t.”

“You shouldn’t,” he says, almost automatically, and her lips quirk up in a half-smile.

“Hypocrite.”

Instinctively, he opens his mouth to protest before realising what he’d said. The protest turns into a slightly sheepish smile as he nods in acknowledgement of her checkmate.

“Touché,” he offers after a moment, and her grin broadens—it actually reaches her eyes this time.

 _We miss you_ , she wants to say, but she bites back the words for fear of scaring him off. That’s a job for someone else—Rossi, maybe, but not her. Instead, she shifts the conversation back to slightly more level ground. They’ve pushed enough boundaries for now, and given that neither of them planned on any of this, that’s saying something.

“I told you once I didn’t want to be a profiler,” she says, and he nods, remembering the plane ride back from North Mammon two years ago. Still he thinks she’d make a good profiler, but he can’t deny she’s good at her job, and they’re better about recognising her now. “That doesn’t mean you don’t pick up a few things, spending your time surrounded _by_ profilers.”

It’s his turn to grin, if a little wryly. “I’d be more surprised if you _hadn’t_.”

She answers with a slightly cheeky smile at the thinly veiled compliment, then leans forward, bracing her elbows on her knees. “It’s still early enough,” she points out. He looks at her quizzically, and she nods at the photo behind him. “Go see Jack,” she says softly. “Talk to him, at least.”

Reaching up to rub the back of his neck the way he does when he’s cornered or unsure, he nods, slowly. They’ve both been doing a lot of that this evening, and JJ’s reminded of why she hates those bobblehead dolls so much. She stands (something she’s stopped taking for granted after pregnancy) and makes for the door, assuming the conversation is over. They both need to get out of the office, go home, go to their families.

“JJ.”

His voice stops her at the doorway, right where she’d been standing when all this started, and she turns, one eyebrow raised in question. “Hotch?”

For a fleeting moment, she wishes she either had the courage or knew him well enough to use his given name, because calling him “Hotch” doesn’t feel right in this context. But she’s _not_ that brave, and she’s not Dave Rossi, so “Hotch” it is and will be.

There’s a moment’s hesitation as he struggles with the right words, and finally, he settles on “thank you.” It’s too short and too simple, but he’s hoping she’ll get it anyway.

Tipping her head to one side again, the same indescribable expression in her eyes that she’d worn when he first looked up, she says nothing; then, “You’re welcome,” accompanied by a nod. She doesn’t know if he’ll actually leave or if he’ll be in the office half the night anyway; she’s done all she can. “Good night, Hotch.”

Before he can respond, she’s gone, heading back to her office to pick up her things, and he picks up his cell phone and dials Haley’s number.

“Hey,” he says when she picks up. “It’s me. I know it’s late, but... can I stop by?”

He doesn’t know why she says yes, doesn’t know that exhaustion bleeds into his voice and convinces her that “no” is the wrong thing to say. He’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth—not this time—so he hangs up the phone, sticks a few casefiles into his briefcase, and locks folders into a drawer. Paperwork can wait until tomorrow.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s down in the almost empty garage, unlocking his car and tossing his things in the backseat. He hears the beep of an unlock a few rows down, and he looks up through the open door and the frame of the car. Catching JJ’s eye, he offers a small smile and a nod of thanks, because yelling across the garage is hardly useful. She’s on the phone, but she nods back and waves, which turns into a teasing shooing motion that makes him laugh for the first time in... too long.

They both step into their cars, starting engines and pulling out before heading for the exit and turning in opposite directions. Tomorrow, there will be a set of murders in Nashville, Tennessee, and they’ll be there for almost a week trying to save the latest victim. Tomorrow, they’ll hear of the sixth death and will lose two more before they catch the bastard, and both Unit Chief and Unit Liaison will flinch over the loss of another child. They’ll call home on an almost daily basis, trying to reassure themselves that their families are still intact, even though it’s almost impossible and nothing but seeing them in person will accomplish that. Tonight, though, the BAU bullpen is empty not because the team is facing the manifestation of evil in some town miles away, but because they have gone home, and it’s the first time in weeks that no one is working the graveyard shift.

 _Finis._

 _Feedback is always appreciated_.


End file.
